wefalck

Hi Pat, I don't actually recall having seen here anything that matches your description. If you find it, I would be keen to see it too ... In the meantime, below is a small clamping device or sub-table I made for the milling machine a few years ago. It basically consist of an aluminium bar with a T-slot milled along one of the sides. This T-slot allows to clamp two holding-down fingers anywere along the table. Two shorter fingers act as stop for the part, while it is worked on. A plate at the back of the block acts as fulcrum for the holding-down fingers and can be raised and lowered accordingly. The whole things screws down onto the milling machine table with two screws and T-Nuts. Incidentally, talking about holding-down fingers: you may want to google for 'finger plate' and will find various more or less clever devices for holding small parts. E.g. here: http://www.modelenginemaker.com/index.php?topic=1434.0 http://www.homemodelenginemachinist.com/showthread.php?t=13004

Yep, it is a standard fitting on small sailing boats - the advantage over the closed type is that you can take the rope in and out without having to reeve it through a hole. Their are commonly used at both ends of a boat for mooring lines or also for anchor lines - in both cases you may not want to take the line of its belaying point when hauling in or paying out - in case it slips from your hands.

There is and was probably a big difference between commerical and naval vessels. As has been pointed out before, on naval vessels intensive maintenance was both, a necessity to maintain a good fighting capability and a work-therapy for large crews that otherwise would become bored and unmanagable very quickly. During WWI and WWII particulary the axis powers faced supply chain issues, lacking spare parts and materials. War losses also meant long duty-cycles with only short breaks. All this together had its effect on the appearance of say German ships. Apart from the aspects of owners' and master's pride, crews as small as possible meant also that maintenance was only carried out when really needed and there was the spare time for it. So, after a rough trip across the North Atlantic they may not look their best. Or, fishing vessels constantly moving between ports and fishing grounds will look rather worn, at least during the season - maintenance is carried out during the off-season. There are plenty of old photographs that show particularly smaller ships involved in local trade are not all 'shipshape and Bristol-fashion' as Dana put it. Coming back to the original question: I used a mixture of approaches, namely washes with burnt umber (I would rather avoid black as being too stark) and white, as well as a dusting with white pastels. It may be worthwhile to have a look at what railway modellers do, who sometimes are quite fond of the aged and degraded. Belwo is an example not of a real wood-deck, but a painted one. However, the weathering technique would be more or less the same:

Well, here in France strikes are very common, but usually affect only parts of the system, as there are different unions on different lines. Good thing that I work from home most of the time ... Photographs pre-1880 are a big problem in Germany. There weren't that many photographers at the time that would take pictures outside of studios. And again the war-losses are probably significant. So, it might be very difficult to come by pictures unless they had been published somewhere before WW2. My grandmother used to live next door to the most eminent naval photographer family in Kiel - I think they ran the business for four generations from around the late 1860s on. My father already told me once that their archives were lost during WW2 and some 20 years ago I visited the last in the row, who kept the business going until a few years ago. He confirmed that virtually all their negatives had been lost and that he in fact was trying to rebuild to some extent their archives by obtaining copies from published and private sources. As to rigging, there are a couple of German text books from the late 1840s and a bit later that can serve as a guide. Nevertheless, if I can be of any help, let me know.

Hi John, this project has escaped my attention completely until today ... didn't have much time to browse building logs these days ... I had know the two paintings for years, as the older one has been reproduced in a calender in the mid-1970s and then later also in various books. I am also very interested in this period of shipbuilding. There are notable differences between the 'clippers' of these days and the real ocean carriers that probably carried the bulk of goods around the world (for which no premium would be paid for fast arrival). It also seems that the German ships of the time were much fuller around the bows than the British or US American ones. Unfortunately, the last war, natural desasters (e.g. the 1962 flood in Hamburg), and negligence after the shipyards went out of business lead to most records (including ship's plans) being lost. There are also very few models of commercial ships from that period that survived. So it is indeed not easy to collate a good database for a model reconstruction. Would you mind showing the drawings you did for her ? At the Altonaer Museum in Hamburg they had before WWI build a series of typical ships of the 19th century, based on plans in the Museum and also first hand knowledge of the people working on those models (which has its good and bad points). Here is one example: (Apologies for the poor image quality, but the lighting is not so conducive to visitors taking pictures, plus the glass cases) I full series of images can be found here: http://www.maritima-et-mechanika.org/maritime/hamburg/altona.html, but I focused on the smaller units, as I was collating material for another model reconstruction project. If you need help in reconstructing deck fittings and rigging details, I can probably mobilise friends around Hamburg/Bremen/Brake to take pictures of models preserved in the various museums. As someone mentioned the book of Däbritz and Quinger a word of 'warning': these authors mainly worked with material from the museum in Rostock at the Baltic coast. The Baltic coast seemed to always lag behind a bit in development and did have other commercial constraints/incentives than the world-trade ports of Hamburg and Bremen. In consequence, there are notable differences in the lines development and appearance between ships from the Baltic and the North Sea. Looking forward to see this project evolve ...

Given their size and weight, it would be impossible to put so much tension on them that they were completely straight. There is always a slight catenary in them.

You are probably talking of Stockholm Tar, which is obtained from resinous trees and has various shades of brown. Since the middle of the 19th century more and more tar as residue from coking hard coal - to obtain gas for illumination and to make coke for steel-making, became available in large quantities. This tar is black in concentrated form and dark brown in thinnish layers. So one needs to make distinctions for different historic periods. However, this has been discussed repeatedly already on this forum. In general, I think the ratlines might be lighter in colour, as their material may have been treated only during the manufacture, but not after installation.

You are right in principle, but achieving a uniform catenary as it were for all the shrouds, stays and back stays would be difficult to achieve. In practical terms I would go for uniform straight standing rigging. If you don’t get the catenary right, the model will look messy and poorly executed.

... that was exactly my thought, when I started reading the thread. The nearest dealer for Slovenia would be CoolTool in Mödling near Vienna (www.thecooltool.com). I did have some dealings with them during my time in Vienna actually. I was surprised to learn, however, that Sherline doesn't mind shipping directly and I bought from them back at a time, when I was an international civil servant and didn't need to pay import duties. The latter is a serious consideration when ordering in the US. Plus, the US Postal Office changed their shipping plans a few years ago and abandoned the cheaper 'surface' mail - which was good value, if you had the patience to wait for your parcel for up to three months. P.S. The CoolTool guys call the Sherline mill UniMill and the lathe UniTurn ...

The truth may be, as so often, somewhere in the middle. I gather ratlines typically would have been made from material heavily soaked with tar during the making - as pointed out above. So they would be of some greyish-brownish colour, given also the weathering and salt deposits. I would try to avoid too stark contrast to the rest of the standing rigging and blend them somewhat in. The same applies to the running rigging, I think the contrast to the standing rigging should not be too stark. The smaller the scale, the less contrast I would go for.

Question: how did you actually tie your knots ? I use tweezers in each hand and start from the middle, not from the forward or rear shroud. This reduces the risk of pulling the shrouds together. If a piece of cardboard with the shroud/ratline layout behind the shrouds is not enough as guidance, you may think of several strips of cardboard with notches in the distance of shrouds distributed along the shrouds as spacers. This prevents them from being pulled together. If your knots don't stay tight, you probably used the wrong or too thick material for the ratlines. Actually looking at your pictures, I think this is the problem. The ratlines are much, much thinner than the shrouds. In real life they may have perhaps a diameter of 1 cm or so. In real life as on the model: a thinner line holds better on the shroud, but it cannot be too thin, otherwise it would cut too much into the (bare) feet of the sailors and of course it has to carry their weight.

With the information as indicated by mtaylor you can go into tables of rigging proportions that have been published since about the middle of the 18th century. We can then point you to a book from the apropriate period that will give you the size of ropes from which one can deduct the lengths of blocks and hence their other dimensions.

Thanks, Ed. Looks like an interesting device to make.

Clean and focused work as always ! I have been thinking of making a micro-depth gauge myself and would be interested to see your design solution. Do you remeber in which post no. you showed more details of it ? Very often I use the Vernier caliper for this, but something with less leverage would be useful.

Gee ... you could be already finished with the rattling-down without this gadget, just using a piece of cardboard behind the already installed shrouds on which you have drawn lines with the distance of the ratlines ...

I think the closet is a very neat idea ! I had been thinking along these lines too before I got into serious machining and outgrew a closet - may be a row of closets would still work ...

Having read through the posts, I still don’t really see the advantage of this jig over doing it prototype-fashion on the model. I could foresee a lot of fiddling an pulling in order to get the assembly into the right shape at the right place. For stabilising things I would rather use clear varnish than wood glue, as it allows to correct errors with a drop of solvent.

I think the challenge will be to transfer the assembly to the model ...

With global warming, there may be no need for a reindeer with a glowing nose anymore anyway

Thanks, gentlemen, for your kind comments and 'likes' ************************************************ There are numerous ideas for constructing ladders or stairs for shipmodels. Together with gratings, this seems to be something that pre-occupies the the mind of shipmodellers. Perhaps because spacing saw-cuts evenly is a challenge with hand-tools. Having machines with tool-slides, controlled by spindles with graduated dials, at one’s disposal takes away most of that challenge, at least in theory. It seems logic to transpose the common techniques for making ladders just to a smaller scale, say with thinner saw-blades to cut slots into the spacing device. Preparing a spacing device for stairs However, the sizes of the materials to be used in itself poses a challenge. Treads in (wooden) stairs are typically 25 to 30 mm thick, which translates to roughly 0.2 mm in the 1:160 scale. The stringers of stairs may be somewhere between 40 and 60 mm thick, which translates into 0.3 to 0.4 mm on the model. The treads are usually notched into the stringers, so that the outside of the sides are smooth. This is a technique that would be very difficult to reproduce at this small scale because milling notches 0.2 mm wide and 0.2 mm deep into material that may be as thin as 0.3 mm is practically quite difficult to do consistently. The other difficulty is to cut the treads to exactly the right lengths. This problem also appears, if one tried to simply butt the steps against the sides for glueing. The clean glueing, without fillets appearing, also was a challenge, at least for me. Cutting notches for treads into stair-stringers of bakelite-paper Initially, the material of choice was bakelite-paper, which is very stiff, but rather brittle at a thickness of 0.2 mm and has attracted all the issues mentioned above. I then tried polystyrene, which is much less brittle, but also much less stiff. It has the advantage that it can be glued, or rather welded, using dichloromethane, allowing nearly invisible joints between close-fitting parts. While all these properties are useful, the styrene proved to be too flexible to be sanded to size on the milling machine, compared to the bakelite-paper. After various trials the most promosing method for stairs that emerged was the following: 1. cut strips somewhat wider than the stringers of the stairs from 0.2 mm bakelite paper. 2. arrange these strips in a pack on the micro-vise; count as many strips as needed for the stairs, plus a few spares, and a couple of sacrificial/protective ones at each side of the pack. 3. push the strips down into the vise and then sand them as a pack to equal width. 4. incline the vise to the angle of the stairs and cut slots at the required distances with a fine-toothed saw-blade of 0.2 mm thickness. Cutting slots for steps into stair-stringers of polystyrene 5. cut strips slightly wider than the width of the treads from 0.2 mm bakelite-paper, clean them up and round one edge slightly. 6. cut the treads slightly longer than the final length from those strips. 7. take two stair-stringers and insert the treads, which should be a tight fit, with the rounded side first. 8. adjust one side so that it is straight and the steps are only protruding slightly – everything should be square, of course. Glueing together the stair components 9. infiltrate thin cyanoacrylate cement into the slots and let set thoroughly. 10. adjust the opposite side to the right distance and repeat as above. 11. nip-off excess tread material on the outside. 12. file the outside of the stringers flush with a diamond nail-file and/or the disc sander 13. glue a second layer of 0.2 mm bakelite paper to the outside of the stair-stringers Sanding to thickness the stairs 14. transfer to the vise on the milling machine, slots down, and sand down the stair-stringers to just above the steps. 15. turn the stairs over and sand them down to to the scale width of the stringers. 16. sand the stair-stringers to the required thickness. 17. clean-up all burrs etc. 18. the stairs are now ready to be trimmed to length. Selection of stairs (not yet trimmed to length) I have tried to follow the same procedure with brass-sheet and soldering, but using bakelite-paper gave crisper results. Perhaps one should have etched the components and then soldered them together, as I had envisaged at the very beginning. This would have allowed to hold close tolerances of the individual parts, requiring less clean-up. However, I found setting up the etching process to onerous and also wanted to see, whether I could fabricate the stairs usind classical workshop techniques. The hand-rails and other fittings will be produced later, together with the railings, as they will be very delicate. To be continued ... soon ... first I have to go to Helsinki on business – and to have some Rudo-steak, now that Christmas is over

Liked that luxury long-nosed clamp in brass to catch rigging lines etc. There used to be something similar with a slightly flexible 'nose' (like a Bowden cable) about 10 cm long for electronics people to catch wires for testing in old-time wired boards. Concerning printed flags: as not all ink-jet printer dyes are permanent (as mentioned by someone further up), I retraced the printed designs in acrylics with very fine brushes. The draw-back is that you loose (some of) the transparency.

Thanks for the kind comments I am shortsighted (+4 something), so when I take off my glasses, I get a sort of 'loupe' effect immediately. For many tasks, particularly those involving machines, I am wearing just a pair of protective glasses. I also have set of protective glasses that are magnifying (factor 3) and for really small work, where I need to see in 3D, I indeed use an 'optivisor', but don't find it very comfortable. Some years ago I purchased a set of frames with little telescopes attached to it, of the kind dentists or surgeons use, but found that the field of vision is too small and the working distance to wide in order to work comfortably when sitting at the bench. I gather they are designed for towering over the patient while standing up ... so I don't really use them.

It has been almost a year since the last post. I have been too busy business-wise and been side-tracked by various tool-making projects, which seem to be easier to do with the frequent interruptions by business-travels. There has been some small progress, however. Though this was not easy, as I have been struggling with the possibilities of the available materials and with my own skills. The 1/160 is pretty small, if you have set yourself the target to put as much detail into as one would do in say 1/96 or even 1/48 scale ... One of my struggles has been to produce acceptable ladders, on which I will report in the next post. ********************************************************* The officers’ mess skylight produced previously did not turn out quite to my satisfaction. It was not as crisp as I had wished. It was build up from layers of bakelite sheet around a milled core of acrylic glass. The mouldings present on the original were simulated by 0.4 mm copper wire milled to half-rounds. This all entailed messing around with cyano-acrylate cement, which is not my favourite and at which I am not very skilled. Officers’ mess skylight milled from a small block of acrylic glass It then occurred to me that much of all this could be milled from a solid piece of acrylic glass. One has to start from a block that envelopes the maximum width and depth, including the mouldings, and then has has to plan strategically which layers to mill off until the desired shape appears (reminds me of the joke, where an old lady asked a sculptor during an exhibition whether it was difficult to sculpt a lion – the artist replied: not really, madam, one takes a big block of marble and knock off everything that doesn’t look like a lion ...). The mouldings were left standing as square protrusions. They were rounded off using a draw-plate fasioned from a piece of razor-blade and held in a pin-vise. The half-round notch was cut using a thin cut-off wheel mounted on an arbor in the milling machine. Micro-drawplate for half-round moldings It is, of course, not possible to simulate panelling by this method. However, some parts can be left standing and the other completed with thin styrene-strips. For reasons of material stability, I am not such a big fan of polystyrene, it becomes brittle with age, but it has the advantage that it can be ‘welded’ onto acrylic glass or onto itself using dichlormethane. This results in invisible bonds and you cannot smear any glue around. Trial of milling out skylight window-frame The next challenge were the protective grilles that were laid into the wooden frames above the actual skylight glass-panes. The bar of brass or bronze had a diameter of less than a centimetre, which translates to something like 0.05 mm on the model. However, the thinnest brass-coloured wire I could find had a diametre of 0.1 mm, so is slightly oversize. Recently I came across molybdenum wires that are readily available down to diametres of 0.02 mm ! It seems that they are used in the repair of mobile phones, to separate the front-glass from the LCD-display. I obtained a selection of sizes, but have not worked with the wires yet. The wires are supposed to be tough, so I do not know how easy it is to cut them to length. Spool of gold-coloured molybdenum wire I tried various methods to construct the window-frames with exactly spaced out bar. In the first instance I tried to mill-out the frame from a thin piece of acrylic glass. Evenly spaced notches for the ‘bars’ were milled with a pointed engraving bit. However, I did not manage to get the edges and corners as crisp and clean as desired. Milling notches for window bars Placing wires as window bars I then wanted to construct the frame near-prototype fashion. To this end I drilled holes for the 0.01 mm wires into the edges of 0.5 mm by 1.0 mm strips of styrene. It proved difficult, however, to align the four parts of the frame well enough. Drilling frame for protective bars In the final version I welded 0.25 mm thick strips of styrene onto the milled acrylic glass body of the skylight. The block then was presented at the correct angle to an engraving cutter in the milling machine and the notches for the wires cut. In the next step the wires were glued into these notches, which was a major challenge – for the steadiness of my hand and my patience ... Built-up frames In situ milling of notches for wire bars The frame was completed by another layer of 0.25 mm styrene strips. As the total thickness should have been only 0.4 mm, the excess was sanded off on the milling machine. Finally, the edges were trimmed to size and rounded with the draw-plate described above. Sanding frames to scale thickness The officers' mess skylight will receive an outside protective grille on the basis of an etched part. Completed skylights for the pantry (left) and the officers’ mess (right) To be continued ....

Rather than bakelite (which is phenolic resin filled with wood flour and which is essentially isotropic) I received ‘Novotext’ rods. Novotext is a composite of phenolic resin and cotton fabric. This is bad and good news. The bad news is that its temperature resistance is lower than that of bakelite and, hence, the clamps cannot be used for soldering as originally envisaged. The good news is that Novotext is much less brittle and more elastic than bakelite because the cotton fabric takes up the strain, as does the steel in re-enforced concrete. The material mill and turns well, and you can cut threads in it. So the design is the same as that for the metal clamps. In the end I got some nice clamps out of it, nicer than the wooden ones I attempted. Third hand with made from ‘Novotext’. Some people asked me about the construction details and below you find an ‘exploded diagram’ of the tool. Third hand ‘exploded’

Not having used the tool/product in question, I am not in a position to comment on its utility. However, I would prefer to work 'in situ', that is having the shrouds set up properly before starting 'rattling out'. I would find it difficult and too nerve-wrecking to transfer the net, that is effectively constructed, onto the model without some distortions occurring. In practice, I drew the layout of the shrouds and ratlines on a piece of card that is inserted behind the shrouds. It's then like working on a drawing and you will see any pulling-in of the shrouds and uneven spacing of the ralines immediately. Don't fix the knots until you are finished completely so that you can adjust things if still needed.